The Federal Communications Commission is expected to approve a proposal that would regulate Internet service like a public utility following a nearly year-long debate. This means that companies cannot toggle service to speed it up or slow it down for certain customers or media, and it would prohibit providers from creating Internet fast lanes. Previous regulations approved by the FCC were declared null by a federal court in January last year, and analysts are expecting similar legislative challenges to any approval this time around, as well. Here’s Fortune’s Dan Primack discussing the issue on Boston’s local PBS affiliate.

2. RBS says goodbye to 25 countries.

The Royal Bank of Scotland said it would exit 25 countries where it’s currently operating, cutting its international locations by two-thirds to only 13 countries. RBS will also offload about its North American loans to Japan-based Mizuho Financial Group for about $3 billion. The moves are part of a restructuring plan to turn around the struggling bank, which is expected to post its seventh consecutive annual loss. CEO Ross McEwan is honing the bank’s businesses in an attempt to return the taxpayer-owned bank to private status.

3. Morgan Stanley settles its financial crisis troubles.

Morgan Stanley MSwill pay $2.6 billion to settle its case with the U.S. government over the bank’s sale of mortgage bonds leading up to the financial crisis. The sum is the largest penalty stemming from the crisis for Morgan Stanley. The U.S. Justice Department said Morgan Stanley misled investors by obscuring the quality of the loans captured within bonds that the bank was selling. Morgan Stanley will use past earnings to pay the fine, retroactively decreasing its 2014 earnings by more than a third.

4. How fast are U.S. prices rising?

The Commerce Department released its latest reading of the U.S. Consumer Price Index this morning, giving insight into how fast prices are rising. In January, prices fell 0.7%, the government said, roughly matching expectations. Overall inflation is likely being held down by low oil prices.

The Federal Reserve will likely be watching the inflation data closely. Fed Chair Janet Yellen made it clear that inflation, not jobs, will be the determining factor for when the central bank decides to raise interest rates. She would like to see inflation move towards the Fed’s annual 2% target “over the medium term” before pulling the trigger on a rate increase.

On CNBC Thursday morning, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said the Federal Reserve should make a change to its policy statement next month that would allow it to monitor inflation readings through the spring and then hike interest rates some time in the summer.

5. HP is looking to buy wifi gear maker.

Hewlett Packard HPQ is looking to spend some money to buy wifi network gear maker Aruba NetworksARUN. A deal could be announced as soon as next week, according to Bloomberg News. It wouldn’t be cheap: Aruba has a market cap of about $2 billion. The struggling PC-maker has been making a massive turnaround attempt as it plans to split itself in two to focus more fully on its distinct businesses: consumer and enterprise. Management has also said it would be on the lookout for valuable assets that could support those units.

Greece’s fate: In Angela Merkel’s hands?

Is Greece’s fate in the hands of Angela Merkel? One leading economist with close ties to Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis says that the primary obstacle to compromise is a dramatic division within the German government, with one faction demanding that Greece fully adhere to its previous commitments, and another powerful group advocating compromise.

“It’s all up to Merkel,” says James Galbraith, who spent seven days in mid-February at Varoufakis’ side in Brussels and Athens. “We’ve heard from her finance minister, who takes a negative stance, and from her vice chancellor, who wants to talk. The person we haven’t heard from is Merkel. We know she does not talk until needed. They are as tough as possible, then make one concession at the last minute so they don’t have to make two.”

Galbraith summarizes Merkel’s dilemma—and the best hope for an agreement—with one fundamental question: “Does Merkel want to be the person who presides over the fragmentation of the Eurozone?”

It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely duo than Galbraith and Varoufakis. The former is the Harvard, Yale and Cambridge-educated son of legendary economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Varoufakis is a firebrand who sports leather trench coats and electric blue shirts at meetings with Europe’s stuffy elites, and blasts off on motorcycles to unwind. Yet as colleagues at the University of Texas in Austin, they became not only great friends but intellectual soul mates, co-authoring (along with UK economist Stuart Holland) a 2013 treatise on resolving the Eurozone crisis that advocated for replacing large portions of troubled nations’ sovereign debt with super-safe ECB-backed bonds carrying low interest rates. It’s clear that Galbraith’s ideas helped shape Varoufakis’ controversial campaign to end “austerity” in Greece and protect government jobs and pensions.

Working alongside Varoufakis, Galbraith got an inside view of the chaotic maneuvering at a Eurogroup meeting of European finance ministers, held on February 16 in Brussels. “I stayed with the tech teams, from the 11th to the 17th, including the Brussels meeting,” says Galbraith. “I was in the boiler room with the Greek guys, the working stiffs.”

At the Eurogroup conclave, Pierre Moscovici, the EU commissioner for economic and financial affairs, presented Varoufakis with a draft communiqué that allowed Greece to apply for an extension of its loan agreement while granting time to discuss a new growth program for Greece. As Varoufakis stated at the press conference after the meeting, he was poised to sign the Moscovici communiqué, which he praised as a “splendid document” and a “genuine breakthrough.”

But the chief of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, was working on his own document. “Yanis said, ‘I have a text,’ and Dijesselbloem said, ‘No, this is the text.’”

Galbraith and the Greek team then attempted to combine portions of the two drafts into a document acceptable to both sides. “My day from that point, along with some other people, was taken up with trying to turn either of those texts into something that could be signed. In another half hour, we could have done it.”

Then, according to Galbraith, German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble closed the meeting. “He was saying ‘no’” to fashioning a joint statement as a prelude to a compromise, says Galbraith.

For Galbraith, the lack of coordination on the European side was shocking. “I’m an old Congressional staffer,” he says. “To watch an official body function in this slipshod and ad hoc way, to watch the Eurogroup and the way things were done, was really a revelation.”

On February 18, Varoufakis presented a formal request for an extension of Greece’s loan agreement with the Eurogroup. Once again, the divergent responses left Galbraith confounded.

“Jean-Claude Juncker [president of the European Commission] said it was a good start,” says Galbraith. He also notes that Germany’s vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, said that the loan extension letter was a “starting point” for negotiations. But Schaeuble contradicted Gabriel, dismissing the request as “not a substantial position.”

“My eyes are bugging out watching this,” says Galbraith. “This is Germany, the most powerful government in Europe!”

For Galbraith, the divisions in Germany, and among the nations themselves, have made it clear that the European leadership are poor negotiators. “They made the mistake of exposing to Yanis that they are playing a very hard game, but not playing it very well, from the point of view of basic political skills.” He dismisses the idea that the Greek position is confusing. “I think the Europeans want to pretend to be confused, but the confusion exists in their minds, not in the Greek position.”

For Varoufakis and Galbraith, petty politics is trumping sound economics. “The institutional players—the IMF, European Community, and ECB—have been constructive,” says Galbraith. “But the creditors, the active players, are the finance ministers, and they are divided and hostile.”

The camp strongly opposed to compromise includes Spain, Portugal, and Finland. “Their leaders all facing elections with rising opposition,” Galbraith says. “They’re terrified that their opponents will take heart from the Greek position.” Hence, surviving in office means more than saving the Eurozone.

Breaking the impasse will most likely require the intervention of the only leader powerful enough to pull off such a maneuver: Angela Merkel.

Through all the turmoil, Galbraith’s admiration for his friend Varoufakis has only increased. While many argue that Varoufakis’ unorthodox wardrobe and provocative statements—remarking that the reform agreement amounts to “financial waterboarding,” for example—are antagonizing Europe’s financial establishment, Galbraith says that fellow ministers should welcome him as a rare truth-teller. “His honesty, clarity, and erudition are quite unknown in European circles, so I’m sure it’s quite a shock to experience him for the first time,” he says.

As an example of Varoufakis’ unvarnished honesty, he cites his friend’s statement that among those with whom he’s negotiated, Schaeuble, a staunch opponent, is “the only one whom I have found to have intellectual substance.”

After the depressing experiences in Brussels, Galbraith found the mood in Athens exhilarating. “Just three to six months ago, it was totally depressing. Now there’s a complete change of mood; the sense of pride is restored,” he says.

No one symbolizes that new optimism better than Varoufakis. “We walked together from the ministry to the Parliament nearby, and it’s an experience,” marvels Galbraith. “People in cars roll down their windows to shake his hand, bus drivers stop to salute him, he’s surrounded by kids in the streets.” Varoufakis even stopped for five minutes to reassure a cleaning lady looking for work, his hand on her elbow. “He’s as much of a star as Alexis Tsipras [Greece’s new prime minister],” says Galbraith.

Will Varoufakis fold to keep Greece in the Euro by dropping the growth platform that got the new government elected in the first place? “That’s impossible,” says Galbraith. “He’d get on his motorcycle and drive off. He gnashed his teeth to take the job. He wanted to put his ideas into practice.”

Europe’s finance ministers have never witnessed anything like Varoufakis. Merkel will need to decide if compromising with someone regarded as this radical and outrageous is really an option. The Euro’s future may hang in the balance.

Germany may have just put the nail in Greece’s Euro zone coffin

Germany’s rejection of Greece’s wilted olive branch on Thursday may mean that the Grexit—Greece’s exit from the Eurozone—is now inevitable.

German and European Central Bank officials have grown increasingly obstinate in recent months, showing little sympathy for Greece’s appeals for leniency connected with its bailout agreement. It is unclear what the fallout would be if Greece were to impose capital controls and leave the euro, but it seems that Germany and the ECB just don’t care anymore.

Greece’s new left-wing government blinked on Thursday morning in its month-long standoff with its eurozone partners, saying that it would agree to a six-month extension of the expiring bailout agreement at its current terms so that the two sides could have more time to negotiate. It was a typical “kick the can down the road” move we have come to expect from EU officials, something that Greece’s new government promised it wouldn’t do just a couple days earlier.

The markets rallied on the news, with Greek bank stocks shooting up 10% and Greek 10-year bonds yields falling back to the single digits. The so-called “radical” Greek government finally fell in line with the status quo, and that itself was enough for the market to chill out and hobble onward.

But in a shocking turn of events, Germany’s finance ministry rejected the Greek proposal, saying that it amounted to a bridge financing deal that didn’t propose any “substantial” solutions to the problem at hand.

So, what has changed? Did Germany truly expect a real solution to this issue? Or was the finance ministry just pretending to play hardball to save face with the German public? This wouldn’t be the first time for Germany to claim it was calling Greece’s bluff and then fall apart at the end of the day. It has happened pretty much every time Germany has negotiated a bailout deal since the eurozone debt crisis began in 2009.

But this time could be different. A report in German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung quotes an unnamed central banker from the ECB who believes that the Grexit may now be inevitable. “One gets the impression that the Greeks want to get out [of the euro] and are just looking for a scapegoat,” at this point, the unnamed central banker told the paper.

This comes a couple weeks after the ECB abruptly stopped taking Greek sovereign bonds from Greek banks as collateral for low-cost loans to fund their operations. The ECB had been loaning the banks money and accepting the junk Greek debt at face value even though it was worth a fraction of that amount in the real world, something that, naturally, angered Germany.

The ECB pulled this cheap financing as Greeks were pulling money out of the their banks amid growing fear of a Grexit, when the Greek banks needed the money the most. The Greek banks were forced to turn to their own central bank for cash, which also borrows from the ECB, but at a higher interest rate.

All this has accelerated the run on the Greek banks, forcing the Greek Central Bank to borrow at a frenetic pace from the ECB to make sure they have enough cash on hand to meet demand. But there is a limit to how much the Greek Central Bank can borrow from the ECB, 65 billion euros, and it appears that they just hit the ceiling. The Greeks reportedly asked the ECB to increase their line of credit by 10 billion euros, but the ECB agreed in an emergency meeting overnight that it would only increase it by 3 billion euros.

The ECB knows very well that money buys the Greek banks a week, two weeks tops. The Greek banks won’t need the money if the panic stops, but that won’t happen unless Germany relents and agrees to Greece’s demand for leniency. With Germany saying Nein today just to extend talks without granting any concessions, it is now clear that the whole situation may actually blow up this time.

Greece will then have to make a tough choice. They will either need to accept total defeat and continue on with the terms of the bailout agreement, which would probably result in a Greek default in a few months time, or they can institute capital controls (which would restrict people’s ability to withdraw cash), default on the bailout now, and leave the euro.

Will the Grexit cause the euro to fall apart? Mario Draghi, the head of the ECB, famously promised that he would do “whatever it takes ” to save the euro, so a Grexit may not automatically mean the end of the currency union. He has been preparing for years to counter the backlash that would follow a Grexit, most recently by announcing a multi-billion euro quantitative easing program that could stabilize the bond yields of EU countries if they explode post-Grexit. Will it be enough? No one knows for sure.

For Greece, neither of its option seems acceptable at this point. For some reason, Greeks overwhelmingly want to stay in the euro, which is why the Greek government swallowed its pride and agreed to kick the can down the road. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the current head of the Euro group negotiations with Greece, called for a fourth “extraordinary” meeting tomorrow of finance ministers to discuss the Greek plan. While Dijsselbloem is somewhat hopeful that a deal can be struck—he said at the last meeting that he wouldn’t call another unless he thought a deal was close—it will be impossible to strike an agreement without German backing, meaning a Grexit could be just around the corner.

Unemployed executives finally catch a break

The so-called jobless recovery has been especially tough on people who lost senior management positions in the wake of the downturn and who then, in a classic Catch-22, found that employers wouldn’t interview them because they were unemployed.

“For the past five years, companies only wanted to meet with candidates who were already working,” notes Sally Stetson, a principal at executive recruiters Salveson Stetson Group. “Now, we’re seeing the stigma of unemployment disappear. Employers are looking for the best talent they can find, even if someone has been ‘in transition,’ often through no fault of their own.”

What’s more, companies are offering out-of-work executives the same pay packages as their already employed peers, according to Salveson Stetson’s latest study of the executive job market.

Although the recession technically ended in 2009, the bump in compensation that executives used to get when they changed jobs has been slow to return, the study says. Consider: The average senior manager who switched jobs in 2006 and 2007 saw his or her pay increase by an average of 25%. During the worst of the downturn, in 2008 and 2009, that plummeted to 11%. Now, the average increase has crept up to about 16%, still well below pre-recession levels.

There are two exceptions. Executives with experience managing global manufacturing operations command, on average, a 25% “open-market premium” when they jump to a different company. And senior human resources managers generally get offered compensation that is 20% higher than their current pay.

It’s a straightforward case of supply and demand. International manufacturing expertise is scarce, the study notes, with lots of employers chasing a small pool of candidates. At the same time, HR has become a more complicated field that “demands a higher level of talent-management experience than in the past,” says Stetson. “Candidates need to be able to manage across cultures, develop a Millennial workforce, and act as a strategic advisor to the CEO.”

The job market for experienced senior managers overall is looking livelier than it has in years, she says. “When hiring was slow, everyone was hunkered down in their current jobs. But it’s not unusual now for a strong candidate to get several offers, and people are restless,” Stetson observes. “They’re looking harder at their current role and wondering, ‘Is this where I should be in my career? Am I learning? Is there something out there that might be better?’

“These are always good questions to ask,” she adds. “But for a long time, no one was asking them.”

The Justice Department is probing Moody’s over mortgage ratings

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Moody’s Investors Services for issuing favorable grades on mortgage deals in the lead-up to the financial crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the situation.

The federal probe of the ratings agency, a unit of Moody’s Corp, comes as the Justice Department nears a settlement with Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, a unit of McGraw Hill Financial Inc, over similar conduct, the Journal reported.

Justice Department officials could not be immediately reached for comment by Reuters.

Former Moody’s executives and Justice Department officials have been meeting to discuss ratings of complex securities prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the Journal reported.

The investigation is in a early stage and it is still unclear whether it will lead to a lawsuit, the Journal reported.

The probe comes as the Justice Department nears a $1.37 billion settlement with Standard & Poor’s for similar alleged conduct, the newspaper reported. The Justice Department sued Standard & Poor’s in 2013 for what it said were misleading ratings of residential mortgages leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

This chart explains why stocks have more room to fall

In the past year, a number of prominent stock observers, from Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller to Carl Icahn, have warned that we are in a bubble. Their evidence: the price-earnings ratio of the S&P 500, which is a measure of how expensive stocks are, is higher than average. It currently has a so-called forward multiple, which compares the index’s price to what the companies will earn in the next year, of 16.6. That’s higher than it has been at any point in the past 10 years, including the past market peak in 2008, according to market data firm FactSet.

But the valuation of the S&P 500 is still far lower than it has ever been, when the same ratio was 26 in the early 2000s. So we may still be in the clear.

Or maybe not.

The problem is the S&P 500 might be making the market appear cheaper than it is. The S&P 500 is a market cap-weighted index, so it overweights big stocks versus small stocks, and it is only looking at the shares of 500 of the thousands of stocks that trade.

Wells Capital’s James Paulsen took a look at the non-weighted mean price-to-earnings (p/e) ratio of all the stocks in the market, not just the S&P 500. Based on that, the p/e of the market is just over 20, which is the most expensive it has been since at least 1951 and probably ever, higher than it was in 2000 or 2008, the last two times the market crashed.

Does this mean the stock market will crash? Paulsen doesn’t think so. He says we just need corporate earnings to catch up. And with a better economy, that may be happening. Paulsen also notes that the gap between the two ratios may simply mean that the S&P 500, meaning big stocks, are cheap right now. So maybe its a good time to buy stocks, or at least into an S&P index fund.

So Paulsen says he’s not bearish on the market right now. “Of course, if the market were to fall a lot from here, we’ll look back at this chart and say we probably should have known,” he says.

Volcker what? JPMorgan mints $300 million trading Swiss francs

Earlier this month, traders at the nation’s biggest bank made $300 million in one day, following news that the Swiss central bank was taking its cap off the franc. That caused the currency to soar, and JPMorgan JPM traders took the move, literally, to the bank.

If you have been following financial regulation since the financial crisis—and who hasn’t—or even just read the headlines, this might seem odd. One of the concerns after the financial crisis was that banks were taking too much risk, particularly with government-backed consumer deposits. So, as part of the Dodd-Frank reform law, Congress passed the Volcker Rule, which bans banks from engaging in risky trading. Presumably, this rule would make big paydays like a $300 million gain on a 30% move in the franc not possible.

It was clear from the start that the Volcker Rule had some very large loopholes. But recently, banks are finding their way around Volcker in some unexpected ways. Last week, The New York Times reported that Goldman Sachs was “on a shopping spree with its own money,” buying up mostly commercial real estate but also pieces of some private equity-type investments. But it wasn’t an official private equity fund, so it’s okay.

There’s trading, and then there’s trading. The Volcker Rule was not supposed to stop banks from executing client transactions, which is trading, but supposedly the good, not so risky, kind. But allowing that kind of trading and not the other risky, bad kind was always the big problem with the Volcker Rule. Nearly every bank has announced that they are shutting down their proprietary trading desks, which might give you the impression that the Volcker Rule is working. But JPMorgan made $2.5 billion in fixed income revenue in the last three months of 2014 alone, which seems like an awful lot of money from just doing good, risk-less trading.

JPMorgan could claim that they made the $300 million from collecting commissions on client trades. Matt Levine of Bloomberg ran the math and says it’s possible, but unlikely. But that doesn’t explain what happened to Citigroup C, Deutsche Bank, and Barclays. Those banks lost a total of about $400 million on moves related to the Swiss franc. Clearly, that bank was risking some money in the market.

None of this likely breaks the Volcker Rule, at least not directly. The rule has a loophole that allows banks to trade currencies, but only in the spot market, which is day-to-day trading. Banks are not allowed to buy futures contracts, which involve more leverage, and typically more risk.

But banks still have to make money, and they typically want to make as much as they can. So they are taking much large positions in seemingly safer markets, and trades. Given that JPMorgan made $300 million, it likely had about $1 billion riding on a rising Swiss franc. Citigroup had more betting the opposite way. According to Citi’s last quarterly statement, it believed the most it was likely to lose based on its position on any one day in the currency market was $32 million. JPMorgan put its currency trading risk at just $8 million a day.

But as a few weeks ago showed, these currency markets weren’t as safe as they seemed. The result was a bigger than expected loss for Citi, Barclays, and Deutsche—and the opposite for JPMorgan. The Volcker Rule has limited the amount of risk banks can take, but it hasn’t eliminated it. It’s not clear the banks know that.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly noted that Citigroup had lost $400 million on trading activities related to the Swiss franc. In fact, those losses were incurred by a Citigroup, Barclays, and Deutsche Bank.

S&P, Department of Justice close to $1.37 billion settlement

Ratings company Standard & Poor’s is reportedly close to striking a $1.37 billion settlement with the U.S. Justice Department over mortgage ratings that S&P issued leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

A deal could be finalized as soon as Thursday between the ratings service’s parent company, McGraw Hill Financial, and the Justice Department and more than a dozen states, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cites anonymous sources. Last week, reports surfaced that S&P was close to a deal that would resolve a series of lawsuits brought in recent years by the federal government and several states’ attorneys general.

The lawsuit alleges that S&P knowingly misled investors with inflated ratings of residential mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). If the value of the eventual settlement does reach $1.37 billion, it would be the largest of its kind to stem from pre-crisis mortgage bond ratings.

The Journal adds that most states involved in the settlement talks would receive between $20 million and $25 million as part of the deal, although some states will receive more.

The SEC is expected to file its own lawsuit against Barbara Duka, S&P’s former head of commercial mortgage ratings, sometime this month. Last week, Duka filed a preemptive suit against the SEC in which she asked that the agency’s action against her be heard by a federal court rather than by one of the SEC’s administrative law judges.

Middle class homeowners finally get some good news

The housing recovery, just like everything else in today’s economy, has been uneven.

The epicenter of the housing crisis was in low-income neighborhoods, where a disproportionate number of mortgages were of the subprime variety and where home values tend to be more volatile. Once the crisis hit, a larger percentage of homeowners in these areas fell underwater, meaning they owed more on their home than it was worth. This compounded the troubles these neighborhoods were already in, as many homes were abandoned and it was difficult for qualified first-time buyers to move into these homes because of the legal and financial challenges of working through underwater inventory. And this scenario ultimately led to a bifurcated recovery in which home prices in wealthy neighborhoods appreciated quickly while the recovery failed to reach other locations at all.

In 2014, we finally started to see housing inventory rise again, as the backlog of foreclosed homes started to reach the market and as homeowners reached positive equity, making it easier for them to put their homes on the market.

But because of the uneven nature of the recovery, more homes in the bottom third of home values are underwater than any other group. The folks who own these homes, generally workers in the lower middle class, have not seen their wages rise in real terms for many years.

After years of bad economic news for this group, there’s finally something to cheer about. According to a report released Friday by online real estate listing firm Zillow, home prices at the bottom are finally starting to rise at a faster pace than the market overall. Reads the report:

U.S. homes valued in the lowest one-third of all homes – typically the kind of entry-level starter homes sought by younger, first-time buyers – rose 6.8 percent year-over-year in December, outpacing the 6.6 percent appreciation pace of all homes overall. Home values in the bottom tier bottomed out in January 2012 with a median value of $84,100. By December, they had bounced back to a median value of $101,400. In the fourth quarter, home values in the bottom tier were up 1.5 percent over the third quarter.

This is great news for the housing market. “In many ways, for the housing market to fully normalize, it has to start at the bottom,” said Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries, in a statement. “More lower-end home sellers will help meet demand from entry-level buyers, and these sellers in turn will re-enter the market in search of a slightly pricier home, which will entice more middle- and upper-tier sellers to list their homes.”

The lopsided housing recovery, much like the unequal nature of today’s economy overall, has been a drag on the real estate market. But if faster price appreciation on the bottom end continues this year, 2015 might be the year the housing market approaches normalcy.

Standard & Poor’s settles with the SEC in ratings fraud case

Standard & Poor’s has agreed to pay more than $58 million to settle charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which alleged the ratings company engaged in “fraudulent misconduct” in how it rated certain commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS).

The SEC’s action is the first-ever against a major ratings firm and requires S&P to take a one-year suspension from rating certain CMBS in addition to the monetary fine.

“Investors rely on credit rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s to play it straight when rating complex securities,” said Andrew Ceresney, director of the SEC Enforcement Division. “But Standard & Poor’s elevated its own financial interests above investors by loosening its rating criteria to obtain business and then obscuring these changes from investors.”

Three orders were issued against S&P. One was related to the misrepresentation of rating methodology, while another related to a “false and misleading article” about the rating company’s new criteria initiated in 2012. The third cited internal controls failures in S&P’s oversight of residential mortgage-backed securities ratings.

S&P will pay another $19 million in addition to the SEC fine to settle parallel cases announced Wednesday by the New York and Massachusetts Attorney Generals’ offices.

Former S&P executive Barbara Duka, who oversaw S&P’s CMBS Group, was also charged by the SEC in a related case. She is planning to contest the charges in administrative court.